How do you create a human model from one photo?

Question

im currently doing 3D movie still studies, where i try to recreate a movie still frame as perfectly as possible in 3D.

This is the one im working on right now.

I used the Blam addon to calibrate the camera so it perfectly matches focal length and rotation of the specific scene.

The biggest challenge for me is to create the human models for this.

Till now i use a human model mesh and transform it till the outlines match. Since the camera is calibrated thanks to "Blam" i can then use the Camera Input from the Texture Coordinate Node to apply the texture.

The problem is that i might want to animate the camera in the future.

As soon as the camera moves out of the calibrated position the Camera input for the texture wont work anymore. I know that you can actually project a texture using a lamp. But this will mess with my lighting in the scene.

Any ideas how to solve this particular Problem or thoughts and Ideas to improve my process in general are well appreciated.

Answer 1

A couple of quick thoughts. First, regarding the camera movement, you could bake the image onto your mesh using a couple of different UV unwrappings, then tidy up the colors using texture paint. I don't know if you have a high resolution version of your image but with the one you posted there's not a lot of detail to work with, you'd have to put in a bit of effort to get it to look halfway decent. Here is an extraordinarily primitve demonstration of the concept (I didn't even use a human mesh, just a cube extruded into a vaguely human shape):

To do this, I would first unwrap your person mesh with a "project from view" unwrapping looking from the camera view. Then position the uv faces so the mesh silhouette directly overlaps the human silhouette in the image you're working from.

Use that image as the diffuse color of your person mesh, and because of the unwrapping from the camera perspective it should look correct. The sides will be distorted and the back will just be a mirror of the front, you'll fix that later (at least, the parts that will be seen).

Now duplicate your person mesh in place. Give the new mesh a new material, and in this material add a new image texture (not connected to any shaders) that will receive the baked colors. You also need to re-unwrap the duplicate person mesh to something where the faces do not overlap - you could use "smart UV project", the neatness of the unwrap isn't very important.

Then bake the colors of your first mesh to the texture in your second mesh using "bake selected to active." I'm not going to go through all the steps here because that process is covered elsewhere. Don't forget to save your baked texture externally.

How do I bake a texture using Cycles bake

Now you can clean up the texture using texture paint, taking advantage of the cloning brush, for example, to copy colors and textures from other parts of the mesh.

A different idea: the free MakeHuman program seems to be designed specifically to assist in making human figures (meshes and armatures) that match a reference image. There are various tutorials on YouTube. This might be faster than modeling from scratch, and the results will definitely be higher quality than the quick/hacky method described above.